Last Updated on February 20, 2025
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., is urging the Senate to investigate President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke former national security advisor John Bolton’s personal security details.
Following a threat on his life from Iran, Bolton, who had a contentious relationship with Trump at the end of the president’s first term, was under Secret Service protection.
Speaking on CNN’s ‘State of the Union, Graham warned the U.S. government is abandoning Bolton after the former national security official confronted one of America’s most hostile adversaries, like Iran, and called on the Senate to figure out why Bolton and former Secretary of State lost their personal security details.
“Whether you like Bolton or anybody else, we need to make sure that if you serve in our government and you take a foreign power at the request of the administration, that we do no leave you hanging,” the South Carolina Republican told CNN’s Dana Bash. “The Senate needs to look at what happened and sit down and figure what’s the best way forward,”
The threat of foreign powers against Bolton, Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director during Trump’s first term, and other former national security officials “seemed to be real,” he continued. “I don’t want to leave him hanging it makes it hard to recruit people in the future.”
.@LindseyGrahamSC tells @DanaBashCNN it was a mistake for Trump to revoke security for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo: “Whether you like Bolton or anybody else, we need to make sure that, if you serve in our government and you take out a foreign power at the request of the… pic.twitter.com/7xfXLKcRMe
— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) January 26, 2025
Graham argued Trump will regret the potential repercussion of a former official getting seriously injured or killed by an assassin as a result of his decision to withdraw their security detail.
“If something happened to these people –and, you know, President Trump needs to think about, you know, getting people to serve in the future. Owning that decision,” he said.
Bolton has been extremely critical of Trump after departing from his national security advisor role in 2019.
Trump revoked Pompeo’s security detail one day after returning to office amid removals of other Secret Service details.
“When you have protection, you can’t have it for the rest of your life,” Trump, 78, told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday. “Do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives? I mean, there’s risks to everything.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R – Ark., has joined Graham in splitting with Trump for cutting funding for the secret service for the former security officials.
“I would encourage the president to revisit the decision for those people who are being targeted by Iran,” said Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to “Fox News Sunday.”
“I’ve reviewed the intelligence in the last few days. The threat to anyone involved in President Trump’s strike on Qasem Soleimani is persistent. It’s real. Iran is committed to vengeance against all of these people,” he added.
